Anyone use Patreon?

Maybe you've not heard of 'identity theft'?

If the hackers can get into your email account, your entire life can be taken over by an imposter. This is NOT fear-mongering and is well documented online many times over the past decade or so.

Any exposure is part of the attack surface for hackers, and having UNIQUE passwords, minimizes your exposed attack surface.

Maybe for YOU, there is no concern here, but in my professional experience you cannot assume the skill level nor motivation of hackers.

To be truly safe, one should assume malicious intent and protect oneself as much as possible.

Most people cant be bothered to care until it is all too late.

If you'd like to make yourself an easy target, that is your choice.

Dealing with the long term misery of identity theft and your life on hold until resolved, is also your choice.

If this all seems like fantasy, then you have not educated yourself on the consequences of becoming a victim of identity theft.

To each his own. It is your choice to be safe, or to be sorry. :)

I HAVE heard of identity theft, but if my email address password is different from my password for innocuous sites, such as UU, but my UU password is not different from my password for other innocuous sites, similar to UU, how would they manage to steal my identity? it was an honest question because you claimed to be an expert. If you don't have an actual answer as to how hacking my password from UU could help them hack my email or other important sites, or how hacking my password for UU could help them steal my identity, then just say so. Assuming malicious intent still does not translate to ability to make the jump to hacking sites with different passwords. So the question still stands. How does hacking sites such as UU, which may have the same passwords, help someone hack other sites with different passwords. Do you know the answer or not?
 
Just a suggestion, but couldn't those who want to discuss identity theft, etc., create a separate thread regarding that? This thread is about Patreon.

As the OP, I think it's related, but if it bothers people to have that in this thread, I understand that.

My initial concern about signing up for Patreon was because of safety concerns. I had read that it had been hacked in the past, and if signing up directly through Patreon, that would potentially give access to credit card information to hackers.

And, of course, many sites collect data on us, have ways to infect our computers, and so on. So, since I had never heard of Patreon before, I thought I'd check on others experiences with it before giving it a try.
 
original comment deleted in protest of feeling personally attacked for sharing technical experience
 
Last edited:
Ok. Thanks for your comments, and you are welcome to your opinion.

However, if this is about to become a can of worms, I'm just not going there. I dont have the time nor the energy to debate this topic.*

What started out with offering some friendly advice and some recommendations has ended up now feeling like a personal attack on me and my own experience.

I'm not telling you what to do, and I am certainly not going to do your homework for you.

if you truly care about protecting yourself, it's up to you to do the research to answer those questions.

Yes, I DO know the answer to these questions, but I'm not getting paid here for my time to teach everyone about infosec and similar topics.

You can do whatever you want with your own passwords, and simply I do not care.

If you want to learn more, it's up to you to take the initiative and do a search and read about it or watch some videos on these topics.

My intention was only to offer some guidelines, not to provide a granular tutorial on how to protect against hacking techniques, and I only offered some of what *I* do for myself.

You dont have to listen to me, or take my advice. Your security and protection are not my responsibility, but rather they are YOURS.

I wish you the best of luck online and in life, and this is the last I will speak of this topic here and now.

Further discussion here will be considered beating a dead horse, and I will not engage any further.

Take care. :)

* I am currently the sole, and full-time caretaker of my elderly and terminally ill mother, and I currently have precious little free time to myself. I do not come to the UU forum for negativity, but rather to share knowledge, and as of now, I am having regrets about engaging in this thread and being part of this conversation about passwords and protecting oneself, and this is a lesson I will use to make better choices about spending my time here in the future, especially if my experiences and lessons I have learned and shared, are in fact going to be unappreciated.

I am truly sorry about your mother and hope her remaining time is happy and painless. I can only assume the pain you are feeling is the cause for your rude and arrogant answer. I had appreciated your "lessons", but didn't understand them, and certainly didn't have an "opinion" about something I didn't understand. I only asked for clarification on something YOU brought up. Instead of either giving a simple answer or saying you don't have the time to explain, you have taken the time to attack, which I guess is a substitute for an answer, and condescendingly ask if I'd ever heard of identity theft. Quite possibly you don't know the answer, but your tone and accusations are unwarranted for a simple question. Take care of yourself and I pray for comfort and bliss to come your way. Never having experienced that type of trauma, I can't imagine what you are going through.
 
Please moderate your own interactions, people. Do not goad, snipe, snark or any of countless archaic terms for pissing each other off.

It's really not difficult. Here are a couple of suggestions to start us off:
Don't be preachy and condescending
Don't be mean to people who are trying to be helpful.

Note: I'm a mod, that means I'm allowed to be sarcastic.

(Actually, it probably doesn't but you lot started it.)

Carry on nicely.

Thanks.
 
Of course. I'm sorry for interfering. My concern was that there are some really good teachers who provide content via their Patreon sites and that readers of this thread might get bogged down in general discussions of identity theft, etc.. But that is always and should a concern when using the WWW for anything, as Booli rightly pointed out.
 
Booli, I'm very sorry to hear about your mother. It's such a difficult situation, and your pain is evident.
My thoughts are with you and your mother.
 
Just a suggestion, but couldn't those who want to discuss identity theft, etc., create a separate thread regarding that? This thread is about Patreon.

Apologies to you and everyone else for going on a tangent in my previous posts.

It was not my intention to derail the thread so far off-topic.
 
Please moderate your own interactions, people. Do not goad, snipe, snark or any of countless archaic terms for pissing each other off.

It's really not difficult. Here are a couple of suggestions to start us off:
Don't be preachy and condescending
Don't be mean to people who are trying to be helpful.

Note: I'm a mod, that means I'm allowed to be sarcastic.

(Actually, it probably doesn't but you lot started it.)

Carry on nicely.

Thanks.

Hey, stupid buddhuu. Why did you blacklist us?
 
Top Bottom